![]() The plot, such as it is, turns on the relationship of sexy Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx, a disgruntled alpha plus who imports John, a “Savage”, from New Mexico to London. ![]() Huxley revels in his invention of a future world, especially the celebrated “feelies” and also in many adventitious moments of light comedy reminiscent of his early work. In Brave New World (the title is just the most visible of countless Shakespeare references in the text), we find the world in the hands of 10 World Controllers who administer a global society, bred in test tubes, tranquillised by the mind-numbing drug soma, and graded according to English public school custom (Huxley was an Old Etonian) from alpha plus to epsilon minus. Huxley, the scholarship boy, was steeped in the English classics, and shaped by his education. “Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly,” says one character. But it retained a satirical edge and is also strikingly aphoristic, with a vivid sense of the power of language and ideas in changing human society. A jeu d’esprit quickly became a vehicle for Huxley’s obsession with the consequences of mass industrialisation and the Americanisation of consumer society. Huxley’s most famous novel, a dystopian fable set in the seventh century AF (After Ford), began as a parody of HG Wells ( No 39 in this series), specifically of Men Like Gods, whose optimism Huxley disdained. I’ve put him into this series for the vivacity of his imagination as much as his prose, which is often top-heavy with ideas, and stylistically thin. Today, he is rather out of favour, and mostly read as a curiosity of his time. ![]() In the 1920s, Huxley acquired a reputation for the kind of heartless, satirical fiction that appealed to the Waste Land generation. T he grandson of TH Huxley, an eminent Victorian scientist, and scion of a famous family of public intellectuals, Aldous Huxley was a precociously gifted young man who grew up on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. ![]()
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